The quantity and variety of information available on the internet is vast. For many end-users, however, practical access to much of what the internet has to offer is foreclosed because they do not have an efficient way to download the available information. Traditionally, end-users have accessed the internet via telephone lines and other land-lines which have only a narrow bandwidth. Insufficient bandwidth causes long, frustrating waits, especially when large media objects, such as video clips, are downloaded from the internet onto the user""s computer. A 2 Mb video object, for example, may take as long as an hour to download.
Another drawback of the traditional internet, is that the wealth of available material is not well organized. Consequently, users must resort to search engines in order to identify internet sites that might be of interest to them. These search engines, however, are relatively slow and may fail to identify all sites that are in fact of interest to the user.
One possible solution to the bandwidth dilemma is to transmit information from the internet to users by broadcasting it to them. For example, each conventional analog television channel has sufficient bandwidth to transmit 40 Mbps, which is sufficient for many needs. Moreover, satellite and cable broadcasts may have a bandwidth as great as240 Mbps. These large bandwidths largely relieve the bandwidth insufficiencies of the prior art.
But broadcast has its own difficulties. One important feature of the internet is that each content provider can control the content, timing, and target of every object that it transmits. By contrast, scheduling and distribution control in the broadcast environment is typically controlled by the entity that maintains and operates the broadcast facility. Moreover, broadcast facilities have traditionally been employed to transmit a single type of media object, e.g., television programming. Thus, broadcasters do not have the capability to handle the many classes of media object, including video, audio, and data, available via the internet.
The present invention provides a distributed broadcast system for processing, scheduling, and broadcasting a wide variety of media objects. The media objects may comprise static objects such as data files or dynamic objects such as streaming video, audio, or data.
In a preferred embodiment, the broadcast system of the present invention comprises a media object tracking system, a channel editing segment, a broadcast facility, and a plurality of end-user PCs.
The media object tracking system receives media objects from a plurality of distinct sources and tracks their distribution, modification, and use. Associated with the media-object tracking system are a plurality of editing stations, where received media objects may be processed to create broadcast-ready material.
The channel editing segment preferably comprises a plurality of channel editing centers (CECs) and one or more channel management centers (CMCs) which aggregate broadcast-ready media objects and schedule them for broadcast. Each scheduled media object is encapsulated or encoded in accordance with subscription information associated with the service to which the media object belongs. The encoded media object is multiplexed onto a channel of a broadcast bit stream.
The broadcast facility transmits the encoded bit stream via a broadcast channel. Appropriately equipped end-user PCs receive the transmission and provide the end-user with access to those portions of the broadcast which the end-user is authorized to receive.